John Baer

John M. Baer is a graduate of Mount St. Mary's University in Maryland, holds a Masters Degree from Temple University, is a former Fellow of the American Political Science Assn. in Washington, under whose auspices he studied at the Brookings Institution and worked a year in Congress, and a Fellow of the Loyola University School of Law's inaugural Journalist Law School program in Los Angeles. The National Journal (in 2002) called Baer one of the country's top 10 political journalists outside Washington, saying Baer has, "the ability to take the skin off a politician without making it hurt too much."

Email John at baerj@phillynews.com

Gov. Rendell delivers his executive budget address - his last - to a joint session of the Pa. House and Senate yesterday.

John Baer: Guv's 'interesting' budget ideas are DOA to GOP

Posted 2:17am

GOV. ED yesterday handed the Legislature an either/or plan for Pennsylvania. Enact sweeping sales-tax changes and go after more corporate taxes, or do neither, pass a basic budget and get out of town in an election year.

John Baer: Ed's last budget: Don't expect a lot

Posted 02/08/2010

GOV. ED'S known for offering progressive budgets that go nowhere, that never make the annual deadline and that only pass like kidney stones - slowly and with pain - once his ideas are stripped out by the Legislature.

John Baer: Campaign-finance reform? Show me the money - 02/03/2010: AS STATE lawmakers begin circulating required paperwork to mount their re-election campaigns, here are a few things to think about.
John Baer: Sestak is determined to stay the course - 02/01/2010: JOE SESTAK IS like a mailman. He's out every day delivering lots of stuff over and over to multiple places. One day last week, he did 11 events.
John Baer: State of Obama: Time to produce, not just proclaim - 01/27/2010: AS PRESIDENT Obama addresses Congress and the nation tonight in his first State of the Union speech, he faces the hardest sell of his still young incumbency.
John Baer: Rendell Haiti mission merits praise, not grumbles - 01/25/2010: AFTER ED RENDELL went to Haiti last week and came back with a planeload of orphans, he seemed like a new man. I've watched him since he was district attorney, and don't recall him as energized or enthused.
John Baer: Code Red - 01/20/2010: Will GOP win in Mass. pull the plug on health-care reform?

Is the extraordinary - and until recently, unimaginable - Republican victory in yesterday's Massachusetts Senate race an albatross around the neck of President Obama, an omen of Democratic shipwrecks to come?
John Baer: We don't learn much from education forum - 01/18/2010: IT'S LARGELY A pander-fest, but the audience doesn't seem to mind. Six candidates for governor sit side-by-side at an education forum Saturday sponsored by the state's largest teachers union. The candidates agree that education is good.
John Baer: Saidel eyes lieutenant governor job - 01/13/2010: THE OFFICE OF lieutenant governor, like the office of vice president, gets attention only during speculation about who might hold it or when its occupant commits a gaffe or when the boss resigns, dies or gets indicted.
John Baer: Political ag-ony: All's fair, and fried - 01/11/2010: THIS COLUMN isn't nearly as entertaining as it might have been. I'd planned to tour the 94th annual Pennsylvania Farm Show, in Harrisburg, with Philly biz-guy millionaire and Democratic candidate for governor, Tom Knox.
John Baer: Capitol & cafeteria: Of mice and rats - 01/06/2010: I WASN'T BACK in the Capitol three minutes this week before being greeted by one of its wags with, "The mice are gone and the rats are back."
John Baer: Setting the '09 record straight - 12/30/2009: HEY, KIDS, it's my annual mea culpa column in which I 'fess up to errors of fact or judgment committed under my name during the year now ending.